today’s text: Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman

something tasty to chew on:

The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America
Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley
by June Jordan

It was not natural. And she was the first. Come from a country of many tongues tortured by rupture, by theft, by travel like mismatched clothing packed down into the cargo hold of evil ships sailing, irreversible, into slavery. Come to a country to be docile and dumb, to be big and breeding, easily, to be turkey/horse/cow, to be cook/carpenter/plow, to be 5’6” 140 lbs., in good condition and answering to the name of Tom or Mary: to be bed bait: to be legally spread legs for rape by the master/the master’s son/the master’s overseer/the master’s visiting nephew: to be nothing human nothing family nothing from nowhere nothing that screams nothing that weeps nothing that dreams nothing that keeps anything/anyone deep in your heart: to live forcibly illiterate, forcibly itinerant: to live eyes lowered head bowed: to be worked without rest, to be worked without pay, to be worked without thanks, to be worked day up to nightfall: to be three-fifths of a human being at best: to be this valuable/this hated thing among strangers who purchased your life and then cursed it unceasingly: to be a slave: to be a slave. Come to this country a slave and how should you sing? After the flogging the lynch rope the general terror and weariness what should you know of a lyrical life? How could you, belonging to no one, but property to those despising the smiles of your soul, how could you dare to create yourself: a poet?

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today’s text: Homecoming (published in ‘84, reprinted in ‘96) by Julia Alvarez

today’s text: Homegirls and Handgrenades by Sonia Sanchez.

this book is the reason why i started writing poetry.

i’m gonna start linking the books that i take these poems from…so today: Domestic Work: Poems by Natasha Trethewey